Introduction

Welcome to the website of the Natural Capital: Metaphor, Learning and Human Behaviour research project.

This project has been established through collaboration between colleagues from the Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy at Lancaster University and the Centre for Research in Education and the Environment at the University of Bath. It runs between February 2003 and January 2004 under the auspices of the ESRC’s Environment and Human Behaviour New Opportunities Programme.

The research work of the project comprises a series of four two-day seminars and the discussion pages of this website. There will be related print media outputs.

The seminars are an intellectual adventure involving economists, educationalists, philosophers, sociologists and a range of key people from government, agencies, NGOs and corporations. They will seek to gain insight into the currently stalled momentum of the environmental agenda and the potential of new kinds of institutional and social intelligence to restore that momentum.

We will do this by investigating the role of the ‘natural capital’ concept and associated ideas such as environmental capacity and intergenerational stewardship in framing mainstream sustainability discourse. All these ideas are metaphorical – they take concepts from certain contexts and press them into service to explore others. Such exploration is necessarily dynamic, concentrating on different implications in different areas, prompting new perspectives and values as it advances understanding. Can our mainstream institutions really handle this kind of open-ended thinking? Can they use such ideas creatively as exploratory learning tools? Are bureaucracies bound to be uncomfortable with metaphor? What difference to the use of the natural capital idea-nexus in economics, policy and educational contexts would be made by seeing it as genuinely metaphorical and open-ended? How would this affect our ideas of environmental learning and of the prospects for a learning society? What are the implications for institutional change?

If you would like to be actively involved in exploring these questions, there are still places on some of the seminars. Or you could apply for password access to the discussion pages here, which will contain papers and reports from the seminars, comments, feedback and exploration of emerging themes. Contact the Project Co-ordinator.

Photos courtesy of Curlew Guided Walking.